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brumgrunt writes "Technically a corridor in a science-fiction movie should just be a means of getting from one big expensive set to the next, and yet Den Of Geek writes lovingly of the detailed conduits in films such as Alien, Outland, Solaris and even this year's Moon by Duncan Jones."

Yeah, but there are also tired cliches (like the robot/computer that goes nuts and starts mercilessly killing humans). One of the reasons I liked the recent Moon [wikipedia.org] is because it subverted that tired cliche.

Idiocracy may reach extreme levels and an AI born from the technological singularity may control everything.

People may even have a total lack of privacy.

As long as everyone is confortable (lack of privacy is not uncomfortable by itself, it's the negative reactions of the other people and your broken expectations that do it.) and entertained, nobody will care.

He's not saying the future shouldn't have conflict, he's saying that future doesn't need to always emphasize how horrible EVERYTHING will turn out to be.

That's why people like Star Trek movies, they have conflict, but at the same time, they point out that the future can be bright, technology can be helpful, people can be happy and life is worth living.

Back to the main topic, corridors - they are cheap for filming. That probably influenced the reason to use them more than a necessity in "Sci-Fi" films. I r

Cube was entertaining in several regards. I dug the fact that the set was, as you mentioned, a couple of cubes. I dug the underlying premise of the government project gone awry. But for a lot of the smaller details, you really had to turn your brain off.

Still it's certainly unique enough to be included in a discussion on sci-fi corridors. The corridors were square holes leading to an identical cube. How cool is that?

Not sci-fi, but Closet Land also ranks on minimal set design. Basically it's 2 people

I must quibble- although Heinlein's short story "The Roads Must Roll"(1940) did not specify a setting date in its text, it was set in the same continuity in and occured prior to "The Man who Sold the Moon"(1949), which was set in the then-future of 1978. So, the strike (and associated terrorist activity) was to have been in the then-future 1960s or 1970s, not in 2050.

That was easily one of the worst movies I have ever forced myself to sit down and watch. I still remember the twenty minute scene where the spaceship/rocket is landing on the moon or something. I kept waiting for it to explode or for something to go wrong. Pretty much anything to happen except for it to slowly, slowly, slowly descend and have a completely uneventful landing. It wasn't even like the landing sequence was complicated and interesting to watch.

Really? I thought 2001 was one of the best movies I had ever seen, and I watched it in 1992. Whereas far too many sci-fi films focus on explosions and space-battles that look like WWII dog fights, 2001 seemed clean and plot-driven to me.

no, I didn't. Just picked on one aspect that could have been... how can I say this... shorter.

Its possibly the one film the director's cut version should have 30 minutes removed without harming the movie at all. (actually, I can think of a few others that that applies to, but not with the same intention:)

It was pretty bad. The interesting part only lasted about five minutes and it was just a collection of long, boring space scenes. Maybe I can't appreciate it without reading the book first but I can't see anything excellent about it.

Depends. By the time I saw it, I was told its an Important Film and Important People made it and Important Things happen because its Important Art. As such, its interesting to watch and comment on all the little things that happen and more or less take it apart in your head and sit back and enjoy the swirling lights because they are Important Art. I think for the average filmgoer at the time of release it must have been somewhat unbearable. The critics at the time either loved it or hated it. I think thi

Lets just say its an acquired taste. Its obviously pretty heavily influenced by social conventions at the time. The entire landing sequence is more or less an homage to the drug-heavy counter-culture at the time.

This.

You realise that this was released before the Apollo landings ? There was nothing other than satellites and grainy B&W photos of earth. Then you associate lack of knowledge with drug use.But you treat the imagination of others like shit because they were too early ! Just you wait, grasshop

I think that's because some much sci fi (as distinct from space opera) invariably invokes our fears and anxiety to make compelling stories, rather than developing sophisticated drama. If it's just a story about something sciency, then something must go wrong somewhere in order for there to be conflict; it writes itself. Contrast that to Star Wars and Star Trek, where the science involved is a tool - starships and lasers and space stations - but the conflict comes from personal, character driven scenarios which require forethought and pathos.

I don't think that catastrophe sci fi is anti-science, I just think it's easier - it's the 'disaster movie' equivalent.

The plot can usually be summarized as:...It seems to me that a lot of science fiction has an anti-science bent.

You could just as well say that all non SciFi has the same problem... Govenrment wants to do something stupid and only the maverick politician can save the day; Spouse does something stupid and only two hours of dramatic avoiding-the-real-problem can reunite the couple; Boy wants girl but it takes 90 minutes of wacky adventures and two near-death experiences before he gets the courage to ask her

speaking of popular scifi, this is why I like SG1 - the plots are at least somewhat original. For instance, i watched this last night: SG1 (a secret gov't program) gets a crank call from an over the top conspiracy nut who actually gets some details right. On further investigation, he's a freaky conspiracy nut with info he really shouldn't have and by the end of the show, he's an alien soldier deserter who had an attack of conscience and was being drugged to keep him quiet.

I love many dystopian stories (they're entertaining and often enlightening), but the idea that dystopia is historically inevitable is foolish. Everyone ALWAYS thinks the end is at hand. And yet humanity keeps on progressing in spite of it all. Sure there have been some setbacks, but we've made it through tens of thousands of years now and we're still here, doing better than we've ever done before. You can find the guy walking through any era in known history who's carrying the "The End is Nigh" sign. And it

The problem with your idea is that we are running out of certain natural resources. It will however be interesting to see (assuming I'm reincarnated enough times or something) what happens with the upcoming ice age.

Uh, those technologies are destroying our soil, air, and water. I don't blame you for not being familiar with my posting history, but it's all there— We rarely use crop rotation, we use synthetic pesticides and fertilizers which destroys soil and basically turns it into an inert hydroponic growing medium, and the whole process is highly energy intensive, meaning polluting emissions.

I was about to list a bunch of movies, but I then realized that the movies in which tech goes horribly wrong tends to be in the minority so an article on such things would be rather boring. However, a article on genetic engineering viewed in a good light in movies...now there would be a hard find.

What's mostly wrong with the corridors in Stanley Donen's Saturn 3 (1980) is that the floor-surfaces resemble the base floor of a movie studio, something which had plagued the corridors in the medium-budget Star Wars three years earlier (more on Star Wars corridors in a moment).

The movie that has an opening fight sequence in a corridor and later corridor after corridor on the death star followed by another fight sequence in a prison block corridor only leading up to the-equivalent-of-Jesus getting lightsabered in half in a corridor adjacent to a docking bay.... and you say "more on Star Wars corridors in a moment."

And the second movie? Hoth ice corridors. IV, V & VI are so dependent on corridor shots.

Did you mean to say "The Corridors of Star Wars article will be out later today with a 58 page thesis on the strength of corridor running and combat between rebels and imperials in the Star Wars cinema"?

A friend of mine who films his own movies has a corriodor in his basement. He says that corridor is one of his primary sets.

The same was true with Trek. If they weren't on the bridge, they were in some damn corridor. One of the things I liked about DS9 and Babylon 5 was that they had lots of "open" sets, and tried to avoid corridors as much as possible.

You can't really fault Trek for having so many corridors when most of the shots occur on the ship. If the space ships of Star Trek are anything like U.S. naval vessels, then they are mostly corridors connecting rooms. The rooms will be cargo, berthing, galleys, a few work shops, engineering, and the bridge. If the ship supports fly ops, it will have a hanger and flight deck.

The important thing is that there will be no "open" decks. Everything will be enclosed, much like a modern submarine. Space will be at a premium due to life support considerations, so rooms will be small and packed together. Plus, depending on how long it takes to get around, there is the matter of food and water storage, recycling systems.

In ST:TOS, the Enterprise would often be "three weeks out" from the starbase of the week. It had a crew of about 1,000. So, the ship had to have enough food, water, and air for 1,000 people for three weeks. Even with the "replicators", there would need to be source matter to create the food from. Let us not forget waste handling. Ejecting it from the ship means loss of material, water, and air. Storing requires voids. Recycling it requires space for the recycling equipment.

Also, a ship moves through space so it must have engines and fuel. The bigger the rooms, the bigger the ship, the more mass the ship has, the bigger the engines and the more fuel it needs.

Most people forget many of the details required for life because those details are taken for granted on a planet.

Corridors are the natural result of building large space ships with large crew compliments. Even a large cargo vessel will be some huge empty spaces for the cargo and a large space for engineering both connected to a small crew section which will be mostly small rooms off of corridors.

I disagree. The whole ship could be remote controlled by FTL subspace communication, which is available in that universe. But even if you accept the presence of a large number of meat-bodied crew, they wouldn't need to be housed in such an inefficient fashion, let alone to cross those unneccessary distances on foot.

Of course this makes no sense because Star Trek wasn't made with realism in mind. But that is also true of your reasoning about how it is "natural" there would be corridors.

In ST:TOS, the Enterprise would often be "three weeks out" from the starbase of the week. It had a crew of about 1,000. So, the ship had to have enough food, water, and air for 1,000 people for three weeks. Even with the "replicators", there would need to be source matter to create the food from. Let us not forget waste handling. Ejecting it from the ship means loss of material, water, and air. Storing requires voids. Recycling it requires space for the recycling equipment.

In Trek only two things really seem to take up any significant space: power generation and long-term/reliable data storage. Unfortunately, they haven't figured out how to run their consoles on light in the future, so people are always getting zapped on the deck. (Cars from the 1960s used fiberoptics to centralize light sources, and today we can retrieve information back from that channel... what're all these conductors doing on the bridge?) Oh, and of course, warp drives.

Corridors and hallways are symptoms of bad design, actually. You put them in places where you don't want to bother figuring out how to arrange the rooms so you don't need them. But they're a waste of space and building materials if there aren't factors built into the design which necessarily require hallways (many same-sized rooms, for instance): They're rooms that have no function other than to connect other rooms.

Now, the place where corridors have a great place is literature where they provide a visual

We used to watch that film in college to intentionally scare the crap out of us. It was the one movie that didn't seem to lose its creepiness on repeat viewings.

But there was one part that's always bugged me-- and it's the same thing that bugs me about Sunshine-- and that's the open pools of fluid (water? coolant? whatever?). What kind of asshole engineer has open pools of fluid on a spaceship? Sure, in both of those movies, there's artificial gravity (eh, such a cop-out, but OK), but, hey, artificial

Well, once you invent artificial gravity, you're back to having to have dedicated floor space for walking, standing, sitting, etc. And when your habitat expands beyond just a six person capacity with everyone knowing everything, to a large community where people have specialized tasks, you will probably not want to have everything just sitting out in the open like that for people who don't know what they are doing to accidentally bump things on their way by and not know how to correct it. And when your habitat grows beyond just a few small rooms, you will have to have dedicated travel (dare I say it?) corridors, that are just that, corridors.

When your entire environment is very small and contains a very few smart, well-trained people, you can make use of every available space like they do on the ISS.

Holy Jebus. I knew all those Sci-Fi shots of people sailing gracefully through corridors in zero-G was a myth. I always thought people would just bump into stuff, but now I know that it's because you'd most certainly get an arm or a leg caught in something.

Well... um... you see.. when traveling faster than the speed of light, the corridor light just sort of pools to form a slurry that moves to the back end of the ship. Those pipes are used to pump the light slurry to the front of the ship so people can see....
Um... yeah... still needs some work.

...for the space toilet special. An interview with George Lucas will explore the challenges of sci fi pooping, creating believable multi-species lavatories that account for physical as well as cultural differences, whether Jedi excrement has any force abilities, and the problems traditionally associated with merchandising this under-developed aspect of cinema.

Corridors are the unappreciated bedrock of science fiction. I guess the original reason is because they could be repeatedly used for different parts of a ship/space station/alien planet, but they've taken on a life of their own.

Like the ones in Cube (and se/pre quels) that separate one room from another, short, high, but usually was enough to give a hint on what is forward, or at least see the fate to the first one that went in. Or the one in Coraline (ok, is no sci-fi, but probably qualifies as a "special" corridor).

Am i the only one that doesn't want to see people walking around for 10mins of a 50min show! The worst offence is opening a scene showing somebody silently walking into a room from a corridor, in a 2/3hr film this isn't too bad as it can be used to set the scene (i'd still rather they didn't), but if you add up the time people walk about in a series like Stargate SG-1 it's got to be about a 1/5 of the show!!! I distinctly remember the lack of corridors on firefly as one of the reasons i loved the show!

When a Sci-Fi corridor is mentioned I instantly think of old series Dr. Who. They were all flimsy and cheap, but they were interesting to look at and it always seemed like half the story involved the Doctor and/or an assistant running through them.

The very earliest Dr. Who serials, on occasion, dedicated an entire half hour episode to cutting back and forth between the Dr. + companion, and another group, both walking through corridors or caves on the way to meet up. Sometimes they wouldn't even be talking, just a 5 minute shot of them walking and stepping over debris.

It is interesting that the subject of corridor brought these two things to mind.

The first place i read about the sci fi corridor was in a set of books written using Walt Disney characters in a a space setting. IIRC, they were written at a high level for the demographic, and one of the favorite words was corridor. It took me a while to determine what a corridor was. The character were always going up and down corridors.

I really enjoyed many of the corridors in Dr. Who. Not so much the tardis, but the

- The long corridor connecting the crew module from the propulsion system on the Discovery. Note it was octagonal in section and had no up or down as it was only to be accessed in zero-g.- The short corridor/connector in the shuttle to the moon where the mod space stewardess walks in and, thanks to the tricks of a rotating set and fixed camera, travels up the wall onto the "ceiling" and exits. (She is supposedly held on by her velcro shoes).- The short connector on the Discovery which is where the non-rotating main part of the space-craft meets the rotating part of the crew module. The astronauts must float down it and then clamber down a spinning opening to the part of the spacecraft that has artificial gravity. This is also another great "corridor", here Stanley Kubrik built basically an enclosed ferris wheel and in some memorable shots, had his astronauts jogging all around the "wheel".

Amazing what you can do with a script that isn't pseudo science and a director who cares (and has a good budget!).

While I can appreciate the aesthetic behind your choice of corridors, my favorite corridor is still the Laser Corridor [tvtropes.org] from Resident Evil [wikipedia.org]... it even has a sense of humor [suntimes.com].

Just as people currently endeavor to recreate the manufacturing methods for medieval stained glass or the great pyramids, the people of the future will be awestruck at the ability of 20th and 21st people to make such smooth walls out of the mysterious and amazing material known as drywall.

Corridors in ships serve the same purpose as hallways in homes - to move from one room to another.

The corridors in the original Star Trek were practical. In the Next Generation it was an example of how "soft" the Federation had become, and Q said as much during his forced encounter with the Borg. Enterprise-D was almost like a luxury liner (see season 1's final episode where a guy compares the ship to the QE2).

You have never been on a submarine have you? Space ships have a lot in common with submarines.

Use that space for something! Put labs there!

Yes, because no one would mind people walking through their work space. Who cares if one get's jostled by someone passing through while one is performing a delicate and/or dangerous step in a procedure or experiment?

Crew quarters!

Yes, because no one would mind people walking through their living and sleeping space at all hours of the day and night. I am sure those people on night watch won't mind have their sleep disturbed ever few minutes.

Those corridors connect rooms together. They are hallways. No corridors, and you end up with one huge room which will result in no privacy, a huge waste of air, and is wonderful vulnerability because it takes just a hole or two to kill everyone on the ship.